The tabletop game Raiders of the North Sea was the first of Shem Phillips’ series of worker placement games that will reach its fifth title this fall with the release of Paladins of the West Kingdom, and earned a Kennerspiel des Jahres nomination in 2017, two years after its initial appearance. (I didn’t review or rank it that year because it wasn’t actually a new title; release dates in the board game world are a nebulous thing, and I’m sure I’ve missed titles here and there because of it.) Each game in the series, which includes three North Sea games and now two West Kingdom titles, has some different quirk in how you place or use your meeples, part of how Phillips has managed to extend one theme over so many different titles.
Raiders of the North Sea now has a gorgeous app adaptation from Dire Wolf Digital, makers of the app versions of Lanterns and Lotus as well as the digital card game Eternal (soon coming to tabletop), although I think the initial release of the app could use some updates. If you haven’t played the physical game, or like me had very little experience with it, it’s a great introduction to the title, but I did find that after a handful of plays I was too good for the one AI level included in the app.
The Raiders board has two parts – the village where you’ll place meeples to recruit warriors, collect food, and exchange plunder for more food or for points; and the various harbors, outposts, and fortresses you’ll raid over the course of the game for points and glory. The big difference between this and most worker placement games is that all meeples are shared, and you get two actions on your turn: one when you place the meeple you had to start the turn somewhere in the village, then a second when you remove a meeple from another location in the village. Each location has a unique action, and you thus get two different actions on every turn when you do stuff in the village. Once you have enough warriors, food, and sometimes gold to go raiding, you instead use one meeple to go attack a specific location on the top of the board, taking the plunder shown on that space, gaining a different meeple, and possibly getting points if your warriors’ total strength exceeds the lowest listed value on the space. (You always get the plunder, even if you’re not strong enough.) Most spaces you’ll raid include one or more black skulls, which means you’ll have to sacrifice one of your warriors, sending them to Valhalla, when you attack.
The new app looks fantastic, and the animations for the attacks are particularly fun. Dire Wolf has taken all of the game’s distinctive artwork, animating some portions of it and pulling some of the character images off the cards to show who’s in your crew (as opposed to the characters still in your hand). Their decision to depict the board isometrically was brilliant; the physical board is big and quite long north to south, and the app only shows you a portion at a time – the village fits into a single screen, and then you can scroll up to see all of the potential targets for attacks.
I did have a few small technical issues, including occasional crashes when first loading and difficulty moving the meeple from the lower right corner of the screen to place it if I had the map oriented in a way that there was a village location too close to the same spot. The app only comes with one AI level right now, and I found it too easy, mostly because it would do suboptimal things like attack some targets without sufficient strength to garner points. I also would love a one-touch way to jump between the top and bottom halves of the board, as scrolling is awkward, and the app doesn’t automatically reset you to the village after an opponent attacks.
The app also comes with a campaign mode that includes multiple rules variants, most of which are fun and require you to think a little differently, although I don’t think the campaign bears playing more than once. It’s similar to the campaign mode in Jaipur, but those variants were good enough to try multiple times, while here I always felt like the variations were cool but not as good as the base game.
Games take 10-20 minutes against the AI, depending on how quickly you try to move to the top; I’ve found the long play is best for beating the current AI options, because they don’t try to rack up the largest bonuses up top. I am assuming/hoping some of the minor bugs will disappear with updates, along with a stronger AI option, because the way this app plays and looks is outstanding.